Saturday, 18 July 2009

How-To: Make a Screencast with recordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is a command-line tool which allows to record your entire Linux desktop and save it as a Theora Ogg video. It has GTK and Qt frontends too, and in Ubuntu gtk-recordmydesktop is available in the repositories. To install recordmydesktop in Ubuntu, just type in the GNOME Terminal:

sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

And if you want the GTK frontend, use:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

The simplest way to record your desktop is to run the command recordmydesktop without any parameters inside a terminal, then do whatever you wanted to do, and when you feel the screencast is over, type Ctrl+C in the terminal where you started recordmydesktop to stop it. It will start the procedure of encoding the video to Ogg Theora, which can take a while. The default output file will be out.ogv, located in the same directory from where you started recordmydesktop:

You can also choose the name of the output file:

recordmydesktop -o my_screencast.ogv

Or make it encode the video on-the-fly, so you won't have to wait after hitting Ctrl+C:

There is a setting under Advanced if you want to record 3D effects. Under Advanced/Performance check the "Full shots at every frame" box and you will be able to record 3D with minimal artifacts depending on your processor speed and RAM.